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Glass beads to separate wort from mash ?

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... I brew in a bag exclusively and have never had a slow lauter. You can simply pick the bag up at the end of the mash and let it drain into your cooler and then siphon into your kettle. It takes minutes. I also brew very clear beer. Cloudy wort does not make cloudy beer.

Perfectly clear pilsner, though the glass is frosty so it's a little hard to tell.

View attachment 403652

My experience as well: cloudy wort, clear beer.

Nice looking beer, but hate the glass - GO DAWGS! :p

Brew on :mug:
 
My experience as well: cloudy wort, clear beer.

Nice looking beer, but hate the glass - GO DAWGS! :p

Brew on :mug:

There have been a couple informal studies done on that. Years back, a poster on the Brews & Views forum, Joakim Ruud, posted that he made 2 batches of pils, one with and one without trub. Not only was the with trub batch clearer, tasters preferred it. Unfortunately, that archive is gone so you can't read it for yourself. More recently, Brulosophy did a similar experiment with similar results. Personally I have never found that clear wort ensures clear beer.
 
:off:

Glass beads are good for blasting scale and paint off metals only.

All other glass bead uses are some hippy, mystic mumbo jumbo.

Well, there's also the hollow glass beads that General Mills used to create buoyancy foam for ALVIN. Now used for making offshore oil drilling equipment neutrally buoyant. ******* tree-hugging hippy oil drillers. ;)
 
I'm thinking of lining my mash tun with spruce branches. That's what they used before glass beads were available. The added bonus is you can compost them with the mash, a recyclable false bottom, a renewable resource.

Was thinking I could start selling the spruce branch false bottoms, but freshness is very important, and shipping would be cost prohibitive.
 
I'm currently doing BIAB but I'm not wedded to it. My mash tun has a torpedo screen but a trick I discovered is to cover that torpedo screen with a hop sock, and tied off with a twist-tie. It hugely speeds up vorlauf, and you can rinse/clean it and use it again.

Another thing you could do is just use a Wilserbag to line your mash tun; at that point it's not materially different than BIAG, and you can squeeze wort out of the spent grain.

Finally, if one is having trouble w/ very slow or stuck sparges, adding about 8 ounces of rice hulls to the grist will help with that.
 
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